I like to build stuff that is useful and solves problems. This blog contains things that I find interesting enough to write about.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

BREW Support

Well .. I just had to mention it. I know the BREW platform is new and all that and there is not much documentation around apart from the stuff handed out by QualComm but .. I gotta hand it to them .. I am really impressed with the way the Qguys are handling the stuff.For instance, When you want to develop for a particular phone you have to send the phone out to QualComm to get the Test bit enabled. This can be a drag for developers migrating to BREW from Series 60 and other platforms but on their part Qualcomm is pretty quick to return the phones. They received my devices on November 3rd and sent them out the same day using overnight shipping. I got the phones back today :-)... There was a minor snag though the camera stopped working on the devices. Its probably due to some bit on the handset getting the wrong value when they flashed the device. I rang up the tech support at their phone center and they were quick to realise their mistake and are paying for the phones to be shipped back to them. I am not a big fan of the BREW forums at Qualcomm's website but so far all my questions have been answered within 24 hours. This shows that these guys are putting some effort into this. I am slowly getting used to the BREW way of doing things these days and honestly it doesnt seem as big a pain as it did before. Though i admit I havent done all the steps yet and havent actually deployed an application on the handset. From the programming point of view I am getting in touch with a old friend of mine "C" and offcourse "Pointers". Coming from 5-6 months of Java its a bit tough at times but coding in C is a lot easier to get accustomed to then C++.